“The Other Order of Form” presents the work of five contemporary artists that live and work between Latin America and Europe: Fernanda Fragateiro (Portugal), Darío Escobar (Guatemala), Matthias Bitzer (Germany), Patrick Hamilton (Chile), and Eva Berendes (Germany). Beyond their formal and conceptual strategies, they share the use of the plastic language associated with certain formalism but charged with historical, social, and cultural content. 

In that sense, “The Other Order of Form” explores the possibilities derived from the languages from the 20th-century Avant-garde - Constructivism, Neoplasticism, Bauhaus, Neo-Concretism- to talk to us in the present time about matters related to the urban landscape, the desert, and time, as well as of memory and the relationship of our perception of things in front of phenomena that surrounds us. In the works presented in this exhibition, there exists an explicit will to alter our gaze to unlearn what we take for as known and to question our relationship with abstract thought and concrete reality.

Organized by: González y González

The exhibit begins with a grand installation that divides the gallery space by artist Eva Berendes (1974). “Middelburg Curtain” functions as a division wall to the exhibit room, or as an independent sculptural painting. In its architectural scale, it faces the visitors’ bodies as they navigate around it.

Eva’s cotton curtain dominates the space with its striking abstract composition which she created by cutting and sewing pieces of fabric allowing spectators to view it from different perspectives. Berendes first made this type of work for her MA show and ever since then she has gained notorious recognition for her big-scale curtains. 

“Middelburg Curtain” has the essence of a painting, but in a lighter form. Often times in paintings geometric shapes tend to end up having a rigid trait, on the contrary, forms in the curtain have a strong physical presence with movement and dynamism. 

“My practice is really rooted in that kind of thinking, that collision almost between applied art and abstract painting, and that has allowed me to move into other fields” (Eva Berendes).

The German artist Matthias Bitzer (1975) takes reference in both Science and Literature as a starting point to his works, arriving at his largest project: a visual network that fills the voids of our perception of time and space.

Imaginative and eccentric, Bitzer’s paintings merge figuration and abstraction. Aspects from various styles and movements are also perceived in his work. 

In "Pelagic agent" (2021) the artist adopts traits from Surrealism, featuring hybrid characters that challenge human experience and rationality. Bitzer's narrative is complex, creating a new vision of forms and colors as he speaks in a symbolic, unexpected, and uncanny language. 

His technique is far from painterly but rather linear, masterfully achieving shadows and color. "Stubenraucher" (2020), depicts a smoker painted in shades of green and yellow. The lack of local color in the figure's face, the cartoon-like depiction of smoke, and the incorporation of unusual materials such as a color pencil, metal stick, and a ping pong ball, forge a dialogue with 20th-century Modernism and naïve paintings or children drawings. 

The artist constructs the frames himself, encapsulating imagined environments that activate the unconscious mind. 

In his most recent photographic series “Atacama” Patrick Hamilton (1974) presents visual interventions of a desert in northern Chile, intervened with copper plate. They are a series of photographs that when placed next to each other create one big scale multi-panel photograph where different sights from the desert remind us of the multiple stories the desert hides ranging from politics, economics, astronomy, and culture. This series also serves as an homage to Ani and Josef Albers’ trip to Chile and Peru and their experience discovering the textile designs from the Plateau.